"Theodore Sturgeon - Microcosmic God" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sturgeon Theodore)

extraordinarily sensitive transmitter would respond only to Conant’s own body
vibrations. Kidder had instructed Conant that he was not to be disturbed except by
messages of the greatest moment. His ideas and patents, what Conant could pry
out of him, were released under pseudonyms known only to Conant- Kidder didn’t
care.
The result, of course, was an infiltration of the most astonishing advancements
since the dawn of civilization. The nation profited-the world profited. But most of
all, the bank profited. It began to get a little oversize. It began getting its fingers
into other pies. It grew more fingers and had to bake more figurative pies. Before
many years had passed, it was so big that, using Kidder’s many weapons, it almost
matched Kidder in power.
Almost.
Now stand by while I squelch those fellows in the lower left-hand corner who’ve
been saying all this while that Kidder’s slightly improbable; that no man could
ever per-fect himself in so many ways in so many sciences.

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Sturgeon,%20Theodore%20-%20Microcosmic%20God%20v1.0.htm (3 of 27)23-12-2006 16:56:06
 MICROCOSMIC GOD


Well, you’re right. Kidder was a genius-granted. But his genius was not creative.
He was, to the core, a student. He applied what he knew, what he saw, and what
he was taught. When first he began working in his new laboratory on his island he
reasoned something like this:
“Everything I know is what I have been taught by the sayings and writings of
people who have studied the say-ings and writings of people who have-and so on.
Once in a while someone stumbles on something new and he or someone cleverer
uses the idea and disseminates it. But for each one that finds something really
new, a couple of million gather and pass on information that is already current. I’d
know more if I could get the jump on evolu-tionary trends. It takes too long to
wait for the accidents that increase man’s knowledge-my knowledge. If I had
ambition enough now to figure out how to travel ahead in time, I could skim the
surface of the future and just dip down when I saw something interesting. But
time isn’t that way. It can’t be left behind or tossed ahead. What else is left?
“Well, there’s the proposition of speeding intellectual evolution so that I can
observe what it cooks up. That seems a bit inefficient. It would involve more labor
to discipline human minds to that extent than it would to simply apply myself
along those lines. But I can’t apply myself that way. No man can.
“I’m licked. I can’t speed myself up, and I can’t speed other men’s minds up. Isn’t
there an alternative? There must be-somewhere, somehow, there’s got to be an
answer.”
So it was on this, and not on eugenics, or light pumps, or botany, or atomic
physics, that James Kidder applied himself. For a practical man he found the
problem slightly on the metaphysical side; but he attacked it with typical
thoroughness, using his own peculiar brand of logic. Day after day he wandered
over the island, throwing shells im-potently at sea gulls and swearing richly. Then
came a time when he sat indoors and brooded. And only then did he get feverishly
to work.
He worked in his own field, biochemistry, and concen-trated mainly on two things-
genetics and animal metab-olism. He learned, and filed away in his insatiable